Vmware 2V0-41.20 – NSX-T Installation

1. Installing NSX Manager

And you’ll find that the deployment process for Nsxt version two, four and version 30 are actually very similar. So, number one, note that NSX Manager can be deployed either as a virtual appliance running on an ESXi host, or it can be installed on KVM as well. This core largely focuses on Vsphere. We will talk about some KVM resources towards the end of the course, but we’re primarily focused on deploying Nsxt in a Vsphere environment.

So you can use the Vsphere client to deploy NSX Manager virtual appliances and you have an OVF file. So if you’ve ever deployed a virtual appliance with Vsphere before, this process is probably pretty familiar to you. You can use this same OVF file to deploy NSX Manager. NSX Cloud Service Manager for NSX Cloud and the Global Manager for Federation.

We’re going to use it to install NSX Manager. The Cloud Service Manager is a virtual appliance that uses Nsxt Data Center components and integrates them with your public cloud. So we’re going to get this media, this OVF file. Then we will pick a host or cluster that we want to deploy NSX Manager on, and then at that point we’ll log into NSX Manager.

Now at this point, I do want to show you a little bit of the documentation. Here you can see the NSX T Data Center 3. 0 documents and it’s going to basically walk you through this process where you get the file for the virtual appliance and you deploy it using the Vsphere client. And there will be a couple of configuration options that you need to set, like the password and some other parameters as well.

And you can choose again, like I mentioned, to do NSX Manager, a Global Manager appliance or the NSX Cloud Service Manager appliance. So that’s all in the documentation here. If you look at the documentation for Nsxt 2. 4, you’ll notice that the process is nearly identical. So there’s not a whole lot of differences between Nsxt two four and Nsxt version three when it comes to NSX Manager installation.

And here you can see one of the next steps here is to log into the newly created NSX Manager, just basically pointing your browser at the address of NSX Manager and logging in and accepting the end user license agreement. So that’s the next step in our process is to log into the NSX Manager interface. And now we can add a compute manager, which is V Center. So I just want to make a side note here. We do not absolutely need v center.

You don’t have to attach Vcenter as a Compute Manager, but attaching it to Vcenter provides a bunch of automation options. It gives you some easy appliance deployment options, and almost all Nsxt customers are using this. So you’re probably going to set up Vcenter as a Compute Manager. And then at that point, we’re ready to start deploying additional NSX Manager nodes to form a cluster. And again, here we are back at the documentation. You can see here the Nsxt Two four documentation. It’s a pretty straightforward process. We’re going to go to the NSX manager interface and we’re going to go ahead and deploy multiple NSX manager notes. It takes about ten to 15 minutes for those to deploy. So what we’re basically doing is we’re creating a cluster of NSX manager nodes.

And again, the process for Nsxt 3. 0 and 2. 4 is relatively similar. You may notice a couple of differences in the way that you navigate. So just be aware of that, that there may be some relatively minor differences in the way you navigate from one version of Nsxt to another. The menu options may change a little bit, and you can just follow along with the documentation here to get the exact workflow that you need. All right, so let’s talk about some of the requirements for Nsxt Two Four. And again, many of these overlap with Nsxt Three.

We need Vcenter and ESXi Six five update two or later. If I have Vsphere Seven deployed in my environment, that’s only going to be supported with Nsxt 3. 0 or later. When I create a cluster of NSX manager nodes. I have to have a maximum of ten milliseconds of latency between those NSX manager nodes, and I can have a maximum of 150 milliseconds of latency between NSX manager and my transport nodes. Now, if you don’t know what a transport node is yet, don’t worry.

Just think of it as one of my ESXi hosts where virtual machines are going to be running and those virtual machines are going to be connected to my NSX networks. That’s a transport node. There are other types of transport nodes as well, but we won’t get into those just yet. So you may be watching this, and there may be some newer version of Nsxt Out or some newer version of Vsphere that I haven’t yet accounted for in this video. If you need to know if those solutions are interoperable, you can come here to the VMware product interoperability matrix, and I’m including a link to this in your Udemy course resources. So this gives you the option to look at all of these different solutions and determine, hey, are these solutions compatible with whatever version of Vsphere I want to deploy?

And so this gives you that ability to do that. So let’s go ahead and look for NSX T Data Center, and we’re going to see which versions of ESXi it’s compatible with. So here’s my ESXi, and here you can see all of the different versions of Nsxt data center up to the very latest three dot zero dot one. But by the time you watch this video, there may be a newer version. Here I can see exactly which versions of ESXi that version of Nsxt is compatible with. So Nsxt version 30 or 30 one have to be using ESXi 70. If I’m using two, four or later, I can use six seven update three. If I’m using two three, I have to be at six seven update one or later.

And now you can see some of these older versions of Nsxt, like two, three, one, they’re starting to roll off, so they are not supported in later versions of ESXi. All right, so what are the resource requirements for NSX Manager? Well, these vary a little bit depending on whether you’re deploying Nsxt Two, Four or 30. But they’re pretty similar. As you can see here, there are multiple deployment options. We have an extra small option, and the extra small is for the cloud service manager only. You don’t even want to use this in your lab. And so with the extra small, you’ve got two CPUs, eight gigs of memory, and for Nsxt two four, it requires 200 gigs of storage. For NSX T, three requires 300 gigs of storage. If I choose the small size for NSX Manager, that’s appropriate for something like a proof of concept or a lab, it requires four CPUs, 16 gigs of memory. And here are my storage parameters there.

For Nsxt Two, 4200 gigs. For Nsxt 30, 300 gigs. And then if I have up to 64 hosts, a medium size will work. If I have more than 64 hosts, I’m going to need a large form factor. And so, yeah, we’ve got the different sizes of the Nsxt appliance. Just choose the size that fits your workloads. But in a production environment, you’ll either be doing a medium or you’ll be doing a large. Okay, so in order for NSX Manager to work properly, we have to have the correct ports and protocols open. So here we are in the NSX documentation again, and we’re looking at Nsxt 24. You can see here all the ports and protocols that need to be open between Nsxt components. You can see the ports that need to be open to the transport nodes, to the edge nodes for our management interfaces here on the left and between the members of the NSX management cluster itself. So those are the ports for Nsxt 24. Now, for Nsxt 3. 0, we’re using a slightly different method here.

There’s this website for VMware ports and protocols that we can go to, and we can look at all of the Nsxt data center versions, the sources and destinations and which ports need to be open there. So I’ve included a link to this page in the ume course resources. Again, this is not applicable to 24. It’s only applicable to 3. 0. Okay, so now we’ve learned about the installation process of NSX Manager. How do we use it once it’s been deployed? Well, most of the time in this course, you will see me focus on the browser client. I’m going to go to the NSX Manager interface with a web browser and configure everything there. But if you want to automate certain tasks, there is an API and you can go to code vmware. com to get all sorts of automation and API resources for Nsxt.

You can also launch a command line interface to NSX Manager. And there’s a lot of get commands and show commands and clear, there’s not a lot of configuration commands. There is an NSX CLI command reference. So I know I’ve already included a lot in this particular lesson, but in the Udemy course resources, you’ll be able to find the NSX CLI command reference. Now, at the moment, there is not a command line reference for Nsxt three, but I’m sure eventually it will come out. But here’s the NSX CLI command reference for Nsxt two four.

And let’s just scroll down a little bit. And here we can see all of these get commands, right? So if I want to see, for example, get firewall rules, real simple command displays, a summary of firewall rules, and there’s a whole bunch of commands like this that we can use from the command line to get all kinds of information. We can do get interfaces, for example, to look at the interfaces.

So, yeah, there’s a whole lot of commands available here. If you’re more comfortable with the command line, you may find these valuable. Again, there’s not a whole lot of set commands. You can see there’s a few set commands listed here. But the command line is primarily for you to gather information and for you to do things like start captures, do trace routes, stop and start services, things like that. So the command line and the API are not really a big focus of this class. We primarily focus on what we do in the for a client and what we do in the NSX Manager web user interface.